dies, he tells Horatio that he has had a terrifying vision of the afterlife. "0, I could tell you," he begins. But there's no time, and it's too awfUl. Then come Hamlet's last words: "The rest is silence." And so it is-at least, in the 1604 Qyarto. But in the 1623 Folio the line is written thus: The rest is silence. 0, 0, 0, o. We don't know whether Shakespeare added these hammy-looking "O-groans" (as they're known among scholars) or, as HaroldJenkins argues, they were the in- terpolation of some actor playing Ham- let who wanted to prolong his dying scene. How do we decide? The stakes are high; these are the last words of the most famous (and influential) character in Western literature. The editor of the Oxford single- volume "Hamlet," G. R. Hibbard, who chose the Folio text as the basis of his edition for the sake of its "revisions," nevertheless balked at including the unsophisticated-looking O-groans that appear in the Folio. Implicitly condemn- ing them as unworthy of the Bard, he cut them and substituted a stage direc- tion, "He gives a long sigh and dies," words that Shakespeare never wrote. Nonetheless, it is possible to imag- ine that Shakespeare wanted Ham- let to utter those final four "0" s. Mter all, he gives four O-groans to King Lear in the 1608 Qyarto version of that play. Why deny them to Hamlet? It's also true that actors have played the O-groans beautifully in the past. They can be transmuted hom hollow-looking "0" s on the page to a tragic aria onstage, each note registering a deeper apprehen- sion of pity and terror-Hamlet's final, wordless, four-syllable soliloquy of grief (In the summer of 2000, at the recon- structed Globe in London, Mark Ry- lance played them that wa)!.) Scholars such as Rutgers's Maurice Charney have suggested that the addition of O-groans could reflect the way Shakespeare changed as a dramatist, becoming more melodramatic, perhaps, even if there are some who do not approve of the change. The O-groans can also be seen as a final embodiment of the play's tragic iron)!. Hamlet decrees, "The rest is si- lence,,, but instead of silence those final 74 THE NEW YOR.KER., MAY 13, 2002 four "0" s are torn from him by a sorrow and pain beyond his conscious command. The O-groans (like the other thematic variants) are a kind of blank screen: theo- ries projected on those hollow "0" s reflect the theorists' vision of who they think Hamlet (and Shakespeare) ought to be. A nn Thompson, Harold Jenkins's successor, has a haunting memory of her first transformative experience of Shakespeare. She was a Bristol-born teen-ager growing up in Devon. "We had been taken as part of a school trip to an outdoor perfonnance of 'Lear,' " she recalled when we met one recent after- noon in her office at King's College London. The perfonnance took place on the Cornish coast, a site that evoked " L ", D 1:.cc. ear s over CilllS. What struck Thompson most pow- erfully about the performance, she told me, was the disappearance of Cordelia: "I was fascinated to see the actress play- ing Cordelia, after she came offstage in the first act; it was in the round, so you could observe the actors before and after their entrances and exits. Cordelia has nothing to do between that exit in the first act and her reappearance as Qyeen of France an hour and a half later, at the end of the fourth act. And so I watched her emerge from backstage in a bathing suit, go down to the shore, and plunge into the water for a swim be- fore returning to put on Cordelia's royal robes for her entry in Act IV. That fasci- nated me. I don't know why; but it did." Tall and composed, Thompson, who is fifty-four years old, seems remarkably shy; punctuating many of her remarks with a self-effacing laugh. But, however soft-spoken she is, she has emerged with a powerful voice in her profession. At first, she told me, she resisted being drawn into the textual-editing labyrinth. "I did my Ph.D. with Richard Proudfoot," she said. (Proudfoot, a spe- cialist in apocryphal Shakespearean texts, is one of the three Arden general edi- tors.) "He encouraged me to edit a rela- tively obscure apocryphal text, which I refused to do, working instead on Shake- speare's use of Chaucer. Several years later, I got into editing when I was in- vited to do 'The Taming of the Shrew' for the New Cambridge Shakespeare. I discovered I enjoyed editing." She had begun editing the Arden "Cymbeline" when Arden invited her to become a general editor, along with Proudfoot and Columbia's David Scott Kastan-a po- sition of considerable influence in the world of Shakespeare studies. Her rapid ascent, she told me, may in part have been a response to her critique of the male-dominated textual-editing establishment. "I had noticed how few women were involved in editing, and how they always did the same 'easy' Folio-only comedies," she said. ' d I'd given a couple of conference papers on the topic, pointing out the absence of female editors of the major 'difficult' tragedies, so I more or less talked myself into editing 'Ham- let'-'Othello' and 'Lear' having already been assigned to senior male editors." Thompson's assertiveness has caused grumbling among some "senior male ed- itors." But the groundbreaking step she's taking in deconflating "Hamlet" should not be interpreted as an outgrowth of the gender wars. She has worked closely with male Shakespeare scholars; she made her "Hamlet" -text decision in col- laboration with a colleague, Neil Taylor, whom she brought in as her co-editor on "Hamlet." (She has also co-edited a book, "Shakespeare: Meaning & Metaphor," with her husband, John O. Thompson, a:fi1m scholar.) For two years after receiving her "Hamlet" assignment, in 1993, Thomp- son immersed herself in the play's tex- tual problem. She came to the conclu- sion-as she told her fellow-editors at Arden in a heated confrontation-that it would be a mistake to do another con- flated version of "Hamlet." "Harold Jenkins had already done that very well," she said. "I would not have wanted to edit 'Hamlet' if I had to do that. I would not have felt it was worth doing." Her colleagues-and executives at Routledge, the publishing house that owned the Arden imprint at the time- had some practical concerns: the three- text version would be at least a thousand pages long, making it hard to sell to the college market as a single volume. Thompson proposed that it be packaged in two volumes, one with the Qyarto and the introduction, and the other with the Folio and the Bad Qyarto. Mter a struggle, she persuaded Arden to go ahead with the two-volume, three-text version. But some rival scholars have expressed dissent. Gary Taylor, the edi-